


andamento

by sunbrights



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Babysitting, Bodyswap, Canon Compliant, Childhood, Despair, Drabble Collection, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Gen, Island Mode, Parenthood, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Prompt Fic, Self-Harm, Swing Dancing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-11 13:36:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 19,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11715474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbrights/pseuds/sunbrights
Summary: Talent opens doors. Even ones you'd rather stay closed.(A collection of drabbles and short fics originally posted on Tumblr. Tags updated as chapters are posted.)





	1. splinters

“The young master is very particular about his things,” Mitsuya-san tells her on her first day. “He doesn’t appreciate it when they are handled unnecessarily, and he knows when they are out of place. If you have done your job correctly, he will never know you were here.”

Reika hangs on every word. The opportunity to work for the Kuzuryuu family directly is, like she told Mitsuya-san in her interview, an honor and a privilege; she was only transferred up from the kitchens to replace the last maid, who was let go after she was found taking jewelry from Miss Natsumi’s bedroom

(That’s the term the other girls use— “let go”— but all Reika really knows is that one day Fujita-san was there in the house with them, like normal, and the next day she was gone.)

She’s assigned to the young master’s room first. Mitsuya-san tells her it’s because the young master is neater than his sister, and so his room is less of a challenge for someone unused to serving the direct needs of the family. But the other girls crowd her futon that night with conspiratorial whispers. “It’s a test,” Inoue-san tells her, while the others nod along, “to see if you can survive him.”

Reika doesn’t want to tempt their theories. She doesn’t know the young master, but she knows the reach (and the consequences) of his temper.

On her fourth day, Reika tips the young master’s bookcase forward to get at a spot of dust behind it, and misjudges the weight. The entire top shelf dumps out onto the floor: books and packets of candy and, most importantly, the young master’s delicate wooden model of a Sengoku-era warship.

She can only be grateful that the entire figure doesn’t shatter; instead, only the thin oars and masts snap off from the impact. She’s on her knees trying to find all the pieces when the shōji slides open, and suddenly the young master’s tool is looming over her, eyes piercing and expression cold.

Reika has only ever seen her from far away, the young master’s calm and deadly shadow. Seeing her this close, backlit from the sun outside, makes fear rattle up from her gut into her chest. 

She can’t help the sudden rush of tears. Pekoyama-san could slit her throat right here and now and not one single person in the entire compound would bat an eye. She would be like Fujita-san, a derided afterthought, or worse, Pekoyama-san could wipe her out with a single press of her thumb, and it would be like she never even existed.

Pekoyama-san doesn’t do any of those things.

She kneels next to her instead, and gently takes the pieces from her hands. She sets the broken ship aside and starts on the books, carefully sorting and replacing them on the shelf. Reika didn’t think the young master had any organization to his books. Apparently he does, and apparently Pekoyama-san knows it by heart.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Reika asks her eventually, through her own snot and tears.

“Of what?” Pekoyama-san asks in return. A third of the way down the shelf, she tilts the tops of two books together and slips a packet of karinto into the gap between them.

“The young master,” Reika whispers. “What he’ll say when he sees. What he’ll do.”

She’s never seen Pekoyama-san smile before. She’s never met anyone who has. But Pekoyama-san smiles now, her mouth turned softly up at the edges. “No.” She reaches out to clasp Reika’s shoulder, and her grip is gentle. “You should go. Mitsuya-san will be wondering where you are.”

The little model is still broken when Reika comes back for her fifth day. It’s still broken on her sixth, and her tenth, and her twentieth. 

She never hears a word about it.


	2. crossette

Peko comes to his door in a yukata, and invites him to watch the fireworks with her.

Well, no. _With her_ is putting it too strongly. What she says is, “Mioda is having a fireworks display tonight. She wants to know if you’d like to attend.”

The yukata is pink. It’s obviously something Mioda pulled out of storage somewhere; it clashes with the color of Peko’s eyes, and the sleeves ride too far up her forearms. But it’s the first time he’s seen her in one in— years, probably. Since they were kids, at least.

“Kuzuryuu?”

“What?” He has to remember what she asked him. “No. I already told her I’m not going.” He glances back past her shoulder. Mioda is preoccupied with teaching Sonia how to walk in the yukata, their hands clasped together. He lowers his voice. “Are- you going?”

Peko’s gaze is steady. “I’d like to,” she says. Her intonation is flat, but he hears the question in it.

Mioda’s noticed them. She bellows at them, hands on her knees. “Peko-chan, Fuyuhiko-chan! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s gooooo!”

“I’m not going!” he barks. Peko steps back to let him out onto the deck, and he snaps the door shut behind him. “Fuck’s sake. I need a walk.”

“I see,” Peko says, left behind at his door. “Enjoy your night.”

They intersect again at a little beach on the other end of the island, the one they decided on the first day was out of the way enough for them to be able to talk privately. She’s there before him; she must have hit her limit with Mioda early.

It’s a clear enough night that they can see the plume of the fireworks across the water. When she turns toward him, a flash of red illuminates her skin.

“Good evening, Kuzuryuu.” He knows she’s sticking to a script, and the easiest way for her to maintain it when it counts is to never break it, but it’s so seamless that he could forget, sometimes. Almost. “Would you like to watch the fireworks?”

“Might as well.”

He sits with his back to a palm tree; she stands in the sand a few feet away, her face tipped up toward the sky. She’s still wearing her sword bag. He wants to tell her that she can relax, if she wants, but after everything that’s happened he knows she’d never agree.

“Hey. Peko.” She frowns at him. He’s the one breaking the script, now. “We’re gonna be alright. Got it? You and me.”

He thinks he sees her smile. It’s hard to know for sure, in the dark. She looks back up at the sky, where the clouds of smoke from the fireworks are starting to obscure their bursts of color.

“Yes.”  



	3. reparations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: explicit self-harm. Please read with discretion!

His hands are shaking, at first.

It makes the blade catch on one of the inner seams of his button-down. He has to saw through it, and that drives the knife deeper, ragged and clumsy. Slicing through his own skin and muscle isn’t anything like filleting a fish. **  
**

But that’s fine. Bright pain rings in his ears and hot blood spills over his fingers, and it’s fine. Blood for blood, he thinks. That’s what got him here. A dead sister, a dead classmate, both hands soaked through with blood, and Peko—

His vision swims. He can see her, the way he always sees her now: bent over him with blood on her lips, smiling through the pain. Her eyes are cloudy and her skin is waxy, and he watches her die while they tear her apart, blow after blow after blow after

(He sees her whenever he closes his eyes, and now one of them is always shut.)

He digs the knife up and back, until the handle is dragging against his skin. His breath burns in his lungs. His left elbow shakes with the effort of holding his chest up.

For him. Because of him. “You think so too, right, Kuzuryuu-kun?” Nanami had asked back at the hospital, her head tilted, just so. “There’s no way you can die, right?”

A half-assed apology, Saionji called it. It is. Even if he spilled every single drop of blood in his veins, it wouldn’t be enough to make up for half of what he’s done.

It’s still the first decision he’s made since he woke up, alive, that feels correct.

There’s too much blood for him to hold, now. It spills out over his knees, and then out onto the floor. His right hand flattens against the wound like there’s any chance of pressing it shut again, like he deserves anything other than bleeding out on this floor right here, right now. His mouth tastes tangy and metallic.

Mioda screams.


	4. splatter pattern

When she’s thirteen, she slits a man’s throat in his sleep. She’s still inexperienced at handling the splatter at this angle; the initial spray catches her across the face, and it startles her train of thought out of her head. **  
**

She tries to update her mental tally. For the first time, she can’t find the number.

She has to wash the blood off before she can leave. She goes into the man’s bathroom while his blood soaks through his mattress, and meets her own gaze in the mirror. Her glasses are still new, and uncomfortable; the bottom halves of the lenses fogged up from the man’s body heat when she leaned over him to cover his mouth with her hand. 

She sets them on the sink while she washes her face. When she puts them back on, there are faintly pink water spots on the glass. She thinks she should probably wash them, too, but by then she’s already lingered too long, and she has to leave before her teacher leaves without her.

She tries to count again, on the way back to the compound. She imagines each body, each face, each slice of her sword. She gets to a number, but it feels incorrect, like there are minor hits that she’s forgotten and will remember again days from now, when she’s eating lunch or organizing her equipment.

She doesn’t count again after that. It feels like there’s a hum in the back of her head, like something is vibrating inside her, or maybe trembling. She thinks probably she’s just tired.

She asks if she can stand guard outside the young master’s bedroom for the rest of the night, in case of retaliation. Her teacher agrees, with the understanding that she will be at training in the morning, regardless of how much rest she gets in the next handful of hours.

She slides the shōji a fraction of the way open. The young master tosses in his sleep, grumbling about something she can’t quite make out. He’s kicked his blankets halfway off the futon, and has drawn his knees up into his chest to keep himself under what’s left of them. In the morning, he’ll wake well-rested, if bleary, and breakfast with his family. He’ll attend his lessons, do his homework, enjoy the afternoon sun in the garden, and a man who wanted to see him dead will never again breathe a word against him.

Peko closes the shōji, and waits for morning with her katana laid out in her lap.


	5. ricochet

Peko takes a blow meant for him. She shoves him to the ground when someone points a pistol at his head, and the bullet clips her shoulder. The hit isn’t enough to save the shooter, though— her katana leaves their guts smeared on the sidewalk before they can even line up a second shot. **  
**

She bends to help him up. He grabs her by both shoulders and slams her against the pavement. It’s like overpowering a ragdoll, her limbs loose and unresistant, and that only makes him angrier, makes him grind his knuckles into the concrete next to her head until they bleed.

“What the _fuck_ was that?”

“Your reaction times are too slow,” Peko tells him, calm and expressionless. “If I had not intervened, you would be dead.”

He can feel his own lip curling. “You think I give a shit about that?”

Peko doesn’t even blink. She only says, “No.”

They’re at a stalemate, her blood soaking the white sleeve of her jacket and his stinging the back of his hand. Their chests are still heaving from the exertion of the fight. Their bodies are close where he has her pinned to the ground.

Her gaze drops beneath his eyeline, and then flickers back up again.

Something stirs in his chest. Something old and familiar that tugs him forward, like a string tied behind his sternum. He wants something, but _want_ isn’t the right word for it. He lays his palms flat on either side of her head, and he wants, and waits, and something else.

He wants to kiss her, but that’s not new. He’s waiting for something else, for something to change in her face. He wants to see _her_ want. He hopes she can even still—

“You two gonna bone?!” Junko shouts behind them. Her laughter screams through the silent intersection. “Get your folding chairs ready, everybody, we’ve got front-row seats to the UST-slicing of the century! Ooh, it’s gonna be like a hot sword through shortcake, _unf!_ ”

Peko’s expression doesn’t change. She stares up at him, and waits for his decision.

The feeling in his chest shrivels into something he recognizes.

Fuyuhiko climbs off of her. Junko howls with entertained disappointment. “Get up,” he orders.

Peko does.


	6. landscapes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little something I wrote for Natsumi's birthday on 3/27.

Her second week of photography club, her brother makes it his life's mission to ruin every single one of her photos. **  
**

Not on purpose. If it was on purpose she’d almost be able to tolerate it; all she’d have to do to get him to stop would be to twist his arm until he gave up. Instead, he’s fucking things up all on accident: he steps into her light the moment she has it just right, scares the stray cat off the garden wall when she’s trying to sneak up on it, and shouts at her about how she’s not supposed to go into his room without asking him first when she’s trying to focus, yadda yadda.

She runs out of time mid-week. None of her photos are good enough to bring to the club meeting, but she refuses to show up empty handed, so she picks the only decent one she can find: it’s a picture of the house’s tall front gates, flanked on both sides by budding cherry trees, her favorite thing on the grounds to take pictures of. Or it would have been, if her brother hadn’t stuck his head out at the very last second, his mouth open mid-shout, and his face blurred by motion.

It’s the best she has, though, so when the meeting rolls around Natsumi puts it up on the board with the other students’ photos, and sits in the back to wait for the meeting to be over. None of the others will look at her. They’re afraid of her, and they should be.

“I like this one,” Koizumi says, pointing to the board. 

She was picked to be club president this year even though she’s in the same class as Natsumi; the older students had all agreed that the quality of her photos and her zeal for the club made her the best person for the job. Her photos are always bright and full of energy, and she always has them by the truckload. Natsumi’s never seen her without her camera around her neck, even in class and at lunch and in the bathroom.

Her finger is next to the corner of Natsumi’s photo.

“It shows the contrast between the presentation of the house and the real lives of people who live there,” Koizumi is saying. “It’s really good. Whose is it?”

Natsumi doesn’t need to raise her hand. The other students look at each other, and when no one volunteers, it’s only a matter of time before they’re all looking back at her.

“You want to talk about it, Natsumi-chan?” Koizumi asks, annoyingly patient. “You haven’t said much today.”

Natsumi shrugs. The photo’s not as good as Koizumi says it is; she’s just putting too much thought into it, and now the whole room is expecting Natsumi to say something profound. “My stupid brother got his big head in the way when I was trying to take a picture of something else,” she says instead, because it’s true.

Koizumi laughs, and for a second she’s not so picture-perfect: there’s a sarcastic slant to her mouth and her voice drawls with exasperation. “Yep. Sounds like typical boy behavior to me. At least you got something nice out of it, though, right?”

“I’ve got a whole collection of them now, if you’re that interested in how my brother managed to mess up every single picture I took for a whole week.”

“God knows I’ve got plenty like that. We could collaborate.” Koizumi spreads her hands, framing a fake tagline. “How Boys Somehow Manage to Ruin Everything.”

The rest of the students chime in. Natsumi draws her chair closer to the circle, while the others pull out their cameras to show off flubs and embarrassing shots of family members. Turns out the club is more fun when everyone isn’t so intense about it; even Koizumi has a few shots that are, in Natsumi’s professional opinion, absolute garbage.

When the meeting is finished, Koizumi picks her way over while Natsumi is packing her bag. “Me and Yume-chan were going to go shopping after the meeting today,” she says. There’s a tall, quiet girl hovering a few feet behind her. Satou, Natsumi thinks. “Do you want to come?”

Natsumi’s been home early every single day this week. She’s sick of spending all her time with her brother, who’s increasingly had less and less time for her. And she could use a new outfit. This school’s uniform is so drab it's embarrassing.

She says, “Sure.”


	7. feather down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I asked for fanfic tropes as prompts! This one was for "There Is Only One Bed."

The decorative clock in the hotel room is slow by an hour and fifteen minutes. That makes it useless for everything except spelling out in unwanted detail exactly how long he’s been shouting at Peko: nearly a full twenty minutes, since roughly five minutes after they walked in the door. **  
**

He wants to tear it down off the wall.

It’s not the first time this has happened. It’s not even the fifth, or the fifteenth. The dumbass making the reservation forgot Peko was there, or thought she’d sleep out in the hallway, or just flat-out didn’t care one way or the other. They’d booked one room, one bed, for one person.

Ordinarily it’d be annoying, but fine. She’d be able to bunk with the other servants on the trip, or with his sister. She’d have somewhere to go that wasn’t curled up on the floor at the foot of his bed like a dog.

This time is different. This time he’s meeting with the Tōhoku branch heads on his own, without anyone else hanging over his shoulder. They’re the only two on the trip. There is nowhere else for her to go.

She hadn’t even spared it a second thought, when they realized the mistake. She’d just laid her things out on the floor, looked up at him, and said, “You should get some rest, young master.”

That’s around the time he started shouting.

There’s a muffled _thump_ from the room one floor below. Later someone will complain to the front desk about the fight they heard through the walls. The complaint will never reach him, quietly misplaced by a well-paid clerk before it even makes it into the system, but it’ll happen.

It’s horseshit. It’s not a _fight_ if he’s the one who does all the shouting, and if she prefaces everything she says with “Of course, young master,” and “I understand, young master,” and “You’re right, young master.”

He jerks one of the flat base pillows out from the stack at the head of the bed and throws it at the floor. “You know what? Forget it. I’m fucking done.”

“Young master?”

“I’m sleeping on the floor.” He tears the downy top comforter back and pulls out one corner of the bottom sheet. “So do whatever you want. I’m done.” 

The sheet goes taut in his hands. When he looks up, Peko has the opposite corner twisted around her knuckles.

“What the fuck!” He hauls back on his corner, but Peko’s grip is iron. He loses ground just trying to get it away from her. “Let _go!_ ”

“No.”

There's nothing deferential about her stare now. Her eyes are hard and bright, and they don’t flinch away from his glare.

“You have been preparing for this meeting for the past month and a half,” she says. She doesn’t relinquish her grip. “I apologize, but I cannot allow you to be ill-prepared the night before. Not for something this important to you.”

It's not just a meeting. It's a first step. It's the opportunity he needs to finally force people to see _him,_ outside the reach of his father's long shadow, and he hasn't gotten more than four fucking hours of sleep this whole past week.

He drops the sheet. Her grip on it is so tight that it snaps back halfway across the mattress.

“Fine,” he says. “ _Fine_. But that doesn’t change the basic fucking problem. I’m not kicking you to the curb while I sleep on some pile of goddamn marshmallows, okay? I’m not doing it.”

Her eyes swing away, but she’s not avoiding him. She’s thinking. “If I found an alternative,” she says, each word carefully chosen, not quite meeting his gaze, “would you reconsider?”

He looks at the bed.

The room is a luxury suite. The sheets are a mess now, but the bed itself is big. Big enough.

He doesn’t let his brain complete the thought. That doesn’t stop his heart and his lungs and his palms from racing on ahead. “I’m _not_ —”

“Please,” she says. “Trust me.”

He does, so he lets her slip out of the room by herself. She ducks around the corner with her head low, steps quick and silent like it’s a mission and not a stupid argument over sleeping arrangements.

He counts ten more minutes on the useless wall clock before she comes back, arms full so high with pillows and blankets that he can barely see the bounce of her braids over them. She dumps them on the floor at the foot of the bed, and he watches while she rearranges them like jigsaw pieces into two makeshift futons, one beside the other with a foot or so of space between them.

It reminds him of when they were children. When he refused to sleep without her within arm’s reach, to be sure, to be safe.

She looks up at him. She must not like what she sees, because she ducks her head again, already reaching for the broad edge of one of the futons. “Apologies,” she says. She’s trying to lift all the pieces together at once. “I can sleep on the other side of the room, for your privacy.”

“No,” he says, too fast. He sits on the edge of it before she can push it any further. “No, it’s— it’s fine, Peko. This works. It’d be a pain to move it.”

“But—”

“Look.” He preoccupies himself with smoothing the blanket over the stack of pillows. “I wanna sleep while I still might be able to, get it? Before I remember how much shit is riding on tomorrow and spend the whole night thinking about all the ways I could fuck it up. So let’s just sleep. Okay?”

He can feel her watching him. But she doesn’t argue; she only stands to turn out the lights, and triple-check the locks on the door.

His chest is tight when he lays his head down, knotted up over what he’ll say and what they’ll think and Peko sleeping within arm’s reach. But when she lies down beside him, all he can see is the spill of her hair on her pillow, pale in the darkness.  


He sleeps.


	8. HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt for this one was "bodyswap".

They wake up, and it’s wrong. He opens his eyes and feels like himself, whole and unbroken, and it’s wrong. He knows that it is, somewhere in the creeping unease filling his gut, he just doesn’t know _how_. **  
**

The room is dark; he can’t make out anything beyond the glowing rim of the pod he’s lying in. He grips one edge to lift himself up, but his muscles won’t cooperate. They tremble under even a fraction of his own body weight.

There’s a mechanical whirr above him, and other pods around the room hiss as they begin to open. He can’t see them from where he’s sitting, so he counts them to make sure he doesn’t miss any: one, two, three, four.

Someone to his right croaks, “What the _fuck_.”

Kuzuryuu, he thinks. The cadence and intonation is right, but something else about it is wrong. He doesn’t know what. His head feels stuffy and hollow at the same time.

He tries to sit up. He wants to get out, so he can check on the others.

“ _You._ ”

Someone grabs him by the front of his shirt and hauls him up. His eyes take too long to adjust; by the time he can see well enough to make out who it is, they’ve already tossed him, stumbling, out of the pod.

He looks again, vision spotty. It’s Sonia, her face twisted with anger in a way he’s never seen. “I shoulda known this was you!” she shouts. “What’s your plan this time, huh?”

She lunges at him before he can find the words to answer. There’s something like a scuffle, except that neither of them have the muscle mass to do much of anything. They collapse in a heap instead, knees and hands scrabbling on the dirty floor. Sonia tries to pin him down by the base of his collar.

Someone is screaming. It sounds like it should be Souda, but it’s wrong. 

“What’d you do with him!” Sonia shouts, when he manages to wriggle out from under her. She can’t find her feet well enough to follow him. “Where’s Hinata?!”

He falls back against one of the pods; he has to cling to it to stay upright. “I don't….”

His own voice sounds wrong in his ears. It swells in his head, like feedback from a microphone.

The others are in a semicircle around him, brought up by the commotion. Owari has both hands clapped over her mouth. Kuzuryuu is crouched near one of the other pods, fingers twisted in his own hair. Souda is on his knees next to Sonia, talking to her in quiet, urgent tones while she swings wildly at nothing.

It’s _wrong_.

His grip on the smooth outer edge of the pod slips. He hits it on his elbows, nose-to-nose with the glass.

It’s his own face on the other side. It’s still and silent, skin pale and hair unruly, but it’s his face. It’s as unmistakable as it is horrifying, and he recoils, heels of his hands shoved against the lid of the pod.

There is chipped, glossy polish on the nails of his left hand.


	9. cold brew

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt was "Reincarnation AU"!

The line for the coffeeshop is around the block. It’s always long on the last day of the light cycle, everyone trying to get their final fix before the rationing kicks in, but this is out of control. He’s supposed to be using today to actually enjoy the sun while he still has it, but instead he’s spent half his morning in this fucking line waiting for one damn cup of coffee. **  
**

The girl behind him has a fluffy, yappy dog on a leash. She keeps bending down to shush it, but it keeps yapping anyway. It’s driving him up the fucking _wall_.

He taps the man in front of him on the shoulder. “Hey,” he says. “You got any idea what the holdup is?”

“New AI on the register, I guess,” the man says, with the rhythm of repeating something somebody else told him. “Keeps saying the same spiel everybody’s already heard over and over again, and it’s taking forever.”

The dog behind him barks. The girl bends down again. “Hush, Taro. We just have to wait a little longer.”

*

They woke up. Her later than him, but she opened her eyes eventually, and that’s what mattered. That’s what made the waiting worth it, the both of them back from the dead. 

That’s how he wanted to think of it, anyway. A new life. A new start. But it was all the same life, technically: his parents and Hope’s Peak and Enoshima Junko. They couldn’t turn their backs on that, even if they’d wanted to. 

*

“Welcome!” the AI recites a half hour later, when it’s finally his turn. Since he made it through the door he’s heard the same speech eight times. “Happy dark cycle to you, sir! May I interest you in one of our promotional drinks celebrating the—”

“Large. Regular. Six sugars, no milk, no cream.”

“—shot of espresso and rare dark chocolate drizzle, available today only—”

“For _fuck’s_ sake.”

“—ment would like to remind you that the store will be closed for the duration of the dark cycle, and will reopen during normal business hours at the onset of the next—”

“We get it! We all get it!”

“You seem to be in a bit of a rush, sir,” the AI observes, instead of making his damn coffee. “I’ll get that for you right away!”

“Yeah. Great. _Perfect._ ”

He tries to take the cup too fast, when it comes. He fights with the dispenser machine, grabbing for the cup before it’s ready to release it. He lets it go, but the lock still releases, and his cup drops in terrible, terrifying slow-motion.

The girl behind him shoulders him out of the way, and snatches his cup right out of the air.

He spent so much time in line trying not to look at her obnoxious little dog, he’d barely given her a second glance before now. She’s dressed in all black. She has her hair drawn into a single plait over her left shoulder, tied at the end with a red ribbon. Her little dog barks and barks and barks at her feet.

She’s holding his coffee out to him. He’s been staring at her too long.

“Holy shit,” he manages. “I just saw my life flash before my eyes.” He takes the cup, and makes sure to double-check his grip. “Uh, thanks. Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says. It’s simple, polite, and for a second he thinks that’s all she has to say, until she smiles, just slightly. “… It’d be a shame to see it go to waste.”

“Tell me about it.” He raps his knuckles against the counter. “Hey! Robo-spresso.” The AI turns its unflinching smile on him. “Hers is on me. Whatever she wants.”

“Acknowledged!”

“Seriously, thanks,” he says, when the girl looks back at him. “You’re a fuckin’ lifesaver.”

He takes his coffee and leaves.

*

They both wanted it. They both tried. They ran themselves into the ground for trying, but the broken pieces Enoshima left in them wouldn’t mend, no matter how much they wanted to pretend they did. Clutching each other tighter only dug the wounds deeper.

He let go first. He couldn’t stand to be the reason she bled, not like that, not anymore.

*

He gets two blocks from the coffeeshop, then turns on his heel and goes back the way he came.

It’s not really a decision he makes so much as something that happens. It just _feels_ like he’s going in the wrong direction, like there’s an appointment he’s forgotten or something he left behind. He pats all his pockets twice to make sure he has his essentials; there’s nothing out of place.

The girl is still there, outside the shop. She’s crouched with her dog while it laps water up from a shallow bowl, the cup of coffee he bought for her in one hand.

It’s luck, or fate, or bullshit. Either way, he steps up to her. “S’cuse me.” 

She lifts her head, and presses her sunglasses higher on the bridge of her nose. Prescription, they must be. He doesn’t know why he thinks he knows, or why it even matters.

It _doesn’t_ matter. He tries to focus on why he apparently ran back here to find this one random girl, and blurts, “Do you want to have coffee with me?”

He must be losing his damn mind. Even if she wasn’t a near-total stranger, he should at least feel like his heart’s in his throat, his chest tight, his breath short, _something_. Instead it feels like the most natural and obvious thing he’s ever said to anyone in his entire life, including his coffee order to the AI inside, and “happy birthday” to his sister last week.

Her eyebrows lift behind her glasses. She says, “Yes,” like she’s surprised herself. 

Makes sense. It surprises him, too.

“Great.” It’s like coming out of a fucking fugue state. He realizes all at once how awkward it is, standing over a girl he’s barely met with the last coffee of the light cycle in his left hand, asking her to coffee. “Uh, great. It’ll… have to be the ones we got, I guess. Unless waiting in that line again is your idea of a good time.”

“I don’t think so.” She stands up, and he wishes he could see her eyes through her sunglasses, instead of having to look at his own reflection. Her little dog shoves its face between her ankles and yaps some more. “Maybe the park? We still need to finish our walk.”

He smiles at her. She smiles back. “Sounds like a plan.”

*

They healed. Eventually, and individually. They never quite managed _together_ , but in the years that followed she smiled at him and for him and for people and things and places that _weren’t_ him.

That was enough. Even at the end, it was enough.

*

“Step one is figuring out what your name is, probably,” he says. They walk in step with each other, with the little dog between them. They’re blocking half the sidewalk and he couldn’t care less. “Since I apparently decided to skip to step fucking five or some shit, I should probably take a break to go back to that.”

“You could guess,” she offers.

He looks at her. She only half-glances back, ostensibly more concerned with keeping one eye on the sidewalk ahead, but there’s a small curve at the corner of her mouth. He pretends to be preoccupied with all the bullshit things people look for when they’re trying to put a name to a face, but really he just likes the way her braid frames her cheek.

“Starts with P,” he decides. She wrinkles her nose. “What? No way. It’s gotta.”

“Do you think so?” she says. “Nobody’s ever said that before.”

Her name starts with A, it turns out. It feels wrong, like maybe her parents didn’t take a good enough look at her face before giving her the name they already had picked out, but then she tells him that she takes her coffee black, that she works at the zoo downtown, and that she likes to fence in her spare time, and he forgets to care about it.

They have six hours left until the start of the dark cycle. It’ll be a hell of a sunset, at least. And maybe it’s presumptuous to assume that this girl he met today will waste her last few hours of sunlight for the year on him, but he’s feeling optimistic in a way he hasn’t in a long, long time.


	10. adequacy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt was "Alpha / Beta / Omega Dynamics". This doesn't incorporate the sexual aspects of the trope, just as an fyi; the fic itself is rated G.

His dad always told him that he should stand up and be a proper Alpha. **  
**

He didn’t listen. That’s why he’s in the position he is now, probably. When he was a kid, he never cared about being the biggest or the fastest or the loudest; he only ever thought about going home, getting back to the shop where things were quiet and he could concentrate on cracking open the scrapped engine he dragged in from the junkyard.

All it got him was jeers and laughter, months-old projects snapped into pieces in front of him, and, once, a faceful of sand on the playground.

He made the decision when he found the acceptance letter from Hope’s Peak in the shop’s mailbox. His dad had forgotten to get the mail for a few days, so it was stained and warped with rain, but it was still readable enough to make out the _We are pleased to offer you_ in twisting, fancy letters.

Hope’s Peak was a new start. He’d be different. Better. Closer to what he was supposed to be, so that the other Alphas in his class could at least respect him, maybe like him. He changed his hair and bought new clothes. He ditched his glasses and his books. (Hope’s Peak doesn’t care if he studies, anyway.)

Even still, it’s been a rocky transition. On the first day of school, Pekoyama gave him directions to the Omega classroom, and it had taken him three tries to get her to understand that he was in the right place. 

(There hasn’t been a day yet where Saionji hasn’t brought it up.)

Things are different now, though. He has a goal, a crucial task, a _destiny_ to fulfill. He’s not just trying for himself anymore. There’s someone else who needs to see him the way he was meant to be.

And Miss Sonia is _beautiful_.

She’s soft, polite, demure, pristine. Everything a royal Omega should be. Everything any Omega should be. 

He’s never actually talked to her, and he’s only ever seen her from far away, but that’s not important. What’s important is that he can _feel_ it, like instinct in his gut, like a _proper_ Alpha. 

The perfect Omega deserves the perfect Alpha. Someone strong, and brave, and confident, who can protect her, and reassure her when she’s afraid. He’s determined not to talk to her until he knows he can be that for her.

Or, he was. He’s gotten ahead of himself, a little. But she’s right there, chatting with a junior he doesn’t recognize just outside the dining hall, and she is _beautiful_.

“Miss Sonia?” No, wrong. It shouldn’t be a question. “Miss Sonia.” Better. “You got a minute?”

She winces when she smiles, and that’s somehow worse than if she’d just told him off right at the beginning. He powers through the twinge in his chest and smiles back. “I am sorry, Souda-san,” she says. “But I am meeting Mioda-san for lunch. If you will excuse me…”

She’s going to step around him. He’s not supposed to let that happen, right? Assertiveness. Confidence. Dominance. That’s who he’s supposed to be, who he’s trying to be.

“W-Wait,” he says. He clears his throat and reaches for her wrist. “I mean, I’m not—”

Miss Sonia twists her arm out of his grip, and sets the heel of her palm against his chest. She says, “Stop,” and the order is so visceral that it makes him draw both hands back to his ears. 

His heart sinks, before it’s even registered to his head that he’s done it. It’s too weak. Wrong again. Maybe the biggest joke of all was that he could ever learn to be a proper Alpha in the first place.

“I have tolerated this behavior from you and others in the past,” Miss Sonia is saying, “but you have crossed a line, Souda-san. I formally request that you cease and desist.”

“Wh-What?!” The already cracked pieces of his Alpha act shatter. He feels himself shrink, and can’t find the strength to stop it. “No! No, you got it all wrong. I-I wasn’t… I didn’t mean… I thought that _you_ …”

She weathers his incoherency with all the grace and restraint he’d expect from her. “I do not know who it is you think you see, Souda-san,” she says finally, when he’s sputtered himself out. Her eyes are heavy with disappointment. “But it is not me.”

“I… I’m sorry,” he croaks.

She doesn’t answer. She only nods, sharp, and leaves him there alone.

Wrong, again.

Just not the way he thought.


	11. pressing the buoy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt was "We Gotta Take Care of Someone Else's Kid"!

Asahina’s kid has a set of blocks to play with, except that they’re not really _blocks_. As he understands it, they’re shoeboxes scavenged from a whole lot of somewheres, painted to look like brick and wood and glass. Asahina had worked on them all through her pregnancy, even when she was too big around to properly see what she was doing. **  
**

(“She needs to be a kid!” she’d insisted, whenever anyone tried to convince her to slow down, or stop, or that what she had already was enough. “She needs real toys, even in a world like this one.”)

They’re nice. It’s not like the Future Foundation’s compound was designed with children in mind, anyway, and Tsumiki’s recommendation had been to keep the kid indoors, away from the air pollution outside, at least until her critical development years were finished. 

The kid’s done pretty well, considering the circumstances she’s in.

She’s also a fucking _nightmare_. She has her mother’s energy in triplicate, and she loves to destroy what she builds more than she likes to build it in the first place. It’s been ten minutes and he already has a headache blooming behind both temples, while she shrieks and laughs and smashes in the background.

“I don’t think this is wise,” Peko says, again.

She wants to do this even less than he does, he thinks. She’s been doing that thing where she holds all of her joints too stiffly, her shoulders drawn in and her knees locked and her neck pulled back. She hovers by the door with both arms crossed and watches Asahina’s little ogre tumble through play-made cities, eyes narrow and apprehensive.

“It’ll be fine!” Asahina says, again. She clasps Peko by both elbows, which only twists Peko up tighter. “Please! It’s just for one day. I’ll owe you a billion, I’m serious.”

“That,” Fuyuhiko mutters, “and there’s literally nobody else here to do it instead.”

The little ogre drives her whole foot through the side of one of the boxes and sends it flying across the room, where it collapses in a pathetic heap against the wall.

He probably shouldn’t be calling her _little ogre_ out loud, today. At least not while she’s in earshot.

“Hey,” he barks, and her head swivels toward them. She has to shove the mess of her hair out of her eyes. “Let’s go, Sakura. You’re with us.”

*

Sakura demands the pool.

On the one hand, he can’t blame her; the pool is maybe the least boring place in the entire compound, to a kid. On the other hand, pools are pretty fucking boring, and they reek of chemicals to boot. Especially this one, with how aggressively Asahina maintains it.

That doesn’t matter to her little ogre, though. Sakura refuses to let him sit on the deck and watch her play. “That’s boring!” she says, while Peko ties the decorative bows on her swimsuit. “You’re _boring_.”

He sits with her on the steps of the shallow end; that’s as far as he’s willing to let a pipsqueak push him around. She’s not ready to be swimming on her own yet, so she throws things out for Peko to dive for: pens and paperweights swiped from Togami’s desk and, once, Fuyuhiko’s eye patch, because he was stupid enough to take his one good eye off of her for half a goddamn second.

(Peko returns it, cupped in both hands. She tries to hide her smile under the surface of the water, but her nose still scrunches and her eyes still crinkle, and it makes having the damn thing be cold and slimy the rest of the day worth it, just about.)

Sakura gets tired of watching Peko dive, eventually, the way she eventually gets tired of everything. She bounces in the water until it starts to spill over the edge of the pool deck, and then she bounces some more, just to see how high it'll splash.

“F—” He has to clamp his whole jaw down on the rest of the syllable to keep it from coming out the way he wants. “C’mon, hold still, kid. There’s not gonna be any water left at this rate.”

“I wanna go out!” she insists. “Out deeper. Like Aunt Peko!”

Peko lifts her head at the sound of her name. She meets his eye across the water.

“Alright,” he says, and the water churns with Sakura’s excited feet. “But only if you make a deal. You get me? Something for something. That’s the way it works.”

“I get it, I get it!” She cranes her neck back to look at him, and nearly catches him on the chin with the top of her head. “Come _on_. What do I gotta do?”

“Here’s the deal.” He stands up in the shallows, arms hooked around her middle, and she shrieks with delighted laughter. “We’ll go out into the middle, you and me. Out to where Peko is, yeah?” She clambers up to his shoulders while he wades out, arms around his neck. “ _But_ you gotta have one hand on me or her the whole time we’re out there. Got it?” He grips her fingers, in case she isn’t listening. “You don’t do that, and we’re outta here. No exceptions.”

The bottom of the pool starts to slope down. Not by much: the water still only rises about halfway up his chest, but when it sloshes it licks at the bottom of Sakura’s shoulders. She drags herself higher in his arms, one clammy hand against the back of his neck.

“You alright?” he prompts.

She hides her face against the side of his head; the tip of her nose is cold and wet, right in his ear. It’s gross, kind of, but he resists the urge to pull away and scrub at it. 

“You wanna go back?”

“ _No_.”

Peko glides toward them, both hands outstretched. The surface of the water barely ripples.

“We’re here,” he tells Sakura. He’s not sure what else to do, except pat her back with his one free hand. “Peko’s right behind you. One hand on us the whole time, remember?”

Sakura nods against his jaw. She’s got her fingers all twisted up in his hair, now. She doesn’t let go.

“Sakura,” Peko says. “When I count to three, jump.”

Her fingers twist so tight she might actually tear his hair out.

Peko isn’t deterred. “I’ll catch you,” she says. She pats her palms against the surface of the water. “With both hands. You won’t break Fuyuhiko’s rule.”

“Hey,” he whispers. “If you want anybody watching your back, it’s Peko. She’s the best there is, take it from me.”

Sakura lifts her head from his neck. “You ready?” he asks. She rubs at her eyes, and nods. “Alright then.”

“One,” Peko says. “Two…”

Sakura squeals when she hits the water.

*

Peko stoops to wring her hair out onto the pool deck. Sakura copies her, doubled over at the waist, small hands scrunching her dark hair into knots.

“Will you do mine like yours?” she asks.

Peko looks at him for help, but it’s not like he knows how to translate any better than she does. He shrugs, in a way he hopes at least looks apologetic. 

“Like… how?” Peko tries.

“Like yours!” Sakura grips her hair in both hands, uneven clumps on either side of her head. “Um, pigtails.”

“Oh.” Peko touches the side of her own head with her fingertips. She’d let her hair loose, to go swimming. “I… Yes. If you’d like.”

“Yes!” Sakura grabs her by both hands and drags her down to the pool deck. “Sit! And then I sit… here!”

She plops herself down at Peko’s feet, smile big and hair a rat’s nest, and waits. 

Peko’s eyes are big. She looks overwhelmed. She lifts her hands, but they only hover on either side of Sakura’s head, frozen.

He stands up to bring her hair ribbons over to her. They're old, frayed at the ends and more off than white, but she's still kept them, after all this time. She tilts her head back to look at him, and he lets their fingers brush when she takes them. “Thought they might help,” he says. She closes her eyes, and takes a small, measured breath.

When she opens them again, she takes Sakura’s hair in both hands and starts to pick through each of the tangles with her fingertips, methodical and gentle.

“Is it gonna be pretty?” Sakura asks him, when he sits down across from them.

“It’s pretty on her,” he answers. He squints at her. She squints back. “Jury’s still out on you.”

“We’re gonna be _twice_ as pretty,” she tells him. She squirms when Peko tugs through a knot, two fingers against her scalp. So it doesn’t pinch. He remembers that, back from when Natsumi insisted Peko teach her. “And you’re gonna be _zero_ pretty, ‘cause your hair’s not long enough.”

“You need to hold still, Sakura,” Peko says.

Sakura sucks in a breath and holds it. She does manage to keep still, up until the point she has to let all the air out.  “Is it almost done yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Hey,” he says. “You think that’s an easy hairstyle to pull off? You gotta let her work.”

“But I’m _bored_ already.”

“How about I tell you a story, then? Will you sit still for that?”

Sakura’s face scrunches. “I’ve heard all of Mom’s stories already,” she says to her feet. “I know they’re not real.”

“Do I look like your mom to you?” Sakura shakes her head, without looking up. “No. So you know I ain’t gonna bullshit you, right?”

“Bad word,” Sakura mutters.

“You wanna hear the story or not?”

“Fine,” she sighs. “I _guess_.”

“Okay then. Now listen up, ‘cause I’m about to tell you a story about the greatest ninja who ever lived. It’s a big deal, understand?” Sakura looks back at him, eyes round. “‘Cause the greatest ninja who ever lived was a little girl like you, once.”

Peko plaits while he talks. First her fingers smooth through every twisted knot and tangle, until Sakura’s hair lies dark and sleek against her head. Then she splits it into sections: first two, tied high, and then three and three on either side. 

He can’t look at her too much. He’s figured out that the key to keeping the little ogre’s attention is to not let her think there’s something else more interesting she could be paying attention to. But each time he does look, Peko is a little looser: her shoulders slouch, her chin dips, and her fingers pluck and weave with easy confidence.

She ties the braids off with her ribbons, long and fluttery. “There,” she says. Her hands hover for a moment, then skim the top of Sakura’s shoulders, a hesitant little pat. “Finished.”

Sakura nearly falls over when she scrambles to her feet, but it doesn’t stop her, or even slow her down. She sticks her head out over the edge of the pool to check her reflection. “See!” She twists back, and points him in the face, triumphant. “Pretty!”

“Yeah,” he says. “Can’t argue that one.”

*

Getting Sakura down for her nap turns out to be the easiest thing they’ve done all day. She rides the whole way to her room on his back because she demanded it, and ends up half-drooling on his shoulder by the time they’re halfway there.

(He blames the sugar, personally. He’s seen the box of donuts the little ogre hides behind her bed, because she’d drowsily shoved it into his lap when he laid her down, slurring that because the three of them were best friends now, they had to have a donut pact.)

He and Peko sit together on the floor outside Sakura’s door. It’s been a long day; his muscles ache in bizarre places, and his clothes are still damp all over, somehow. He wants a breath, just one, before it starts back up again.

Peko tilts her head back against the wall. Her hair is still loose, and starting to dry in the open air, frizzy and stiff from chlorine. Her eyes are far away. 

He lays his hand out next to hers, close but not touching. He’s learned plenty in the last few years, mostly through trial and error.

“Hey,” he says. Her eyes slide back into focus, and when she looks at him the line of her mouth curves into something that no one would call a recognizable smile, but that he recognizes all the same. “You okay?”

She looks down at their hands, curled next to each other on the floor, and doesn’t answer. She’s learned to think, to take time to sort feeling from instinct. He’s learned to wait.

She wriggles her fingers underneath his hand, so that she can cup her palm up and trace the ridge of his wrist with her thumb. 

“Yes,” she decides, and her touch is warm, twined through his.


	12. reforged

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did an ask meme on Tumblr that involved using flower meanings as prompts -- this one was for azaleas (fragile and ephemeral passion) and kingcups (youth, innocence, dawn).

When they are seven, he reaches out to clasp her hand on their way to the gardens. (He is too young to know better, and she is only a month and a half older.) She doesn’t know what to do, so she ends up somewhere in between: not pulling away but not clasping back, either. It leaves her fingers loose in his grip, like a fish. **  
**

He looks back at her, confused.

Peko understands that she’s made a mistake, but she doesn’t know which mistake it is. Should she have pulled her hand away, to keep her distance? Or should she have held his, the way he obviously wanted her to?

He shakes her arm. “What?” he demands. “What’s that face? What?”

She’s upset him. She’s already doing this wrong. “I’m sorry,” she says. She curls her fingers in, just enough to keep her palm loose against his. “We can hold hands if you want to.”

His fingers wiggle. She’s too-aware of them in a way she’s never been before, warm and soft and a little clammy. She’s too-aware of hers, too, and how they don’t quite fit correctly with his anymore, like her hand is a jigsaw piece someone spilled water on.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he says. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.” She’ll get better. She’ll be what he needs her to be. “We should go. We’ll be late.”

She starts to walk again, but he doesn’t follow her. He stays where he is until she’s far enough away to be tugging on his arm, and even then he only stares, his whole face pinched in toward the middle.

She does tug, gently. She feels her teeth on her bottom lip, old habit, and then she corrects herself, the way she practiced: “Young master.”

His hand goes flat. Her own fingers are still too loose, and he slips away from her without him having to pull at all. He folds his arms over his chest, his hands in his armpits.

“I don’t want to anymore,” he tells her. “Hand holding is for babies anyway.”

He brushes past her, his shoulders hunched. Her palm feels cold, now. She catches herself rubbing it with the thumb of her other hand.

She says, “Yes, young master,” to his retreating back.


	13. sugar push

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More flower fics -- this one was for oats (the witching soul of music). In my head, this is the same Island Mode universe as [shelf sea](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9769337).

Souda and Mioda figure out how to rig up the outside speakers around the hotel pool. It takes three days to get Mioda to agree with the rest of them on what constitutes “pool party music”; it's down to the wire, but just in time to make good use of their next day off.

He lays himself out on one of the lounge chairs on the pool deck. He’s not interested in swimming, but the sky is clear and the sun is bright. He’s content enough to tan while the rest of them take turns shoving each other into the pool.

Peko hoists herself out of the water in a single, effortless motion. She bends to pluck her towel from the end of his chair, and he scoots to give her room to sit on the edge beside him. She’s diligent about her sunscreen, patting herself dry and reapplying every two hours, on the dot. 

Not even ten seconds later, she nudges his knee. He’s expecting her to hassle him about his own sunscreen again (he has his retort ready, coiled on his tongue like a spring waiting to be tripped), but when he squints over, she isn’t even looking at him. She’s focused on making sure she doesn’t miss any spots on her chest, even under the straps of her swimsuit.

She’s… swaying, sort of. It’s a lazy roll of her neck, hips, and shoulders, back in forth, in time with the music. The chorus swells, and he watches her hip bump his knee a second time. 

He’s never seen her do that before. The closest he can remember is when they were kids and borderline normal, bouncing together to street music during the summer festival.

It’s really, really fucking cute.

She bumps him three more times before the song is over. He pushes his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose, and keeps his damn trap shut.

*

Not saying anything was a mistake, maybe.

Just because, he’s not sure how much she realizes she does it, if she realizes it at all. It usually only happens when she’s hyper-focused on something repetitive and boring, like putting on sunscreen or sweeping the restaurant patio or, like today, sitting at the long lunch tables with the others, trying to put Usami’s stupid crafts together.

Mioda’s hooked up her playlist while they work, to help pass the time. Something cheerful and brassy comes on over the speakers, and Peko starts to sway in her seat.

The others are going to notice. They’ll put her under a microscope, and then—

Sonia gasps. “I love this song!” She slaps one hand down on the table between them, and it sends all of Fuyuhiko’s fiddly pieces rolling away from him.

“Dammit, watch it!”

She ignores him. Her fingers flutter over Peko’s wrist. “Pekoyama-san! You understand, don’t you? Please, you must dance with me!”

Peko’s eyes go round. “But… I don’t know how to…”

Sonia drags her to her feet. “That is a mere technicality! I will teach you everything you need to know. Right here, right now!”

Heads are starting to turn.

“Peko-chan’s gonna dance for us?”

“Who wants to take bets on how fast it’ll take her to fall on her face?”

“Be nice, Hiyoko-chan…”

They might as well have put a spotlight on her. She’s stiff-backed and robotic, eyes on her feet while Sonia talks her through basics, and he’s about to say something when Mioda starts the song over again.

Sonia grabs her by both hands. It starts, whether she’s ready or not— and she’s not, going by the way her feet freeze up. But Sonia doesn’t quit, and Peko doesn’t either. She finds the timing. It’s like the sound wiggles under her skin and sloughs off her self-consciousness in layers.

It’s one of those spinning, swinging types of dances. Peko picks it up fast. It’s all timing and footwork, and she’s been built for that her entire life. By halfway through the song she has all the basic steps down pat, even if she stumbles on Sonia’s improvised spins and shuffles. 

Her face is scary, kind of, the same intensely focused one she has on during her kendo matches. That's not a bad sign, though; if anything, it's a good one, the most tried and true way to tell she’s really enjoying something.

The song ends in a burst of trumpets, and Sonia spins her with a flourish. Peko looks bowled over, eyes wide and face red.

There’s scattered whoops and applause, and then interest promptly wanes. The rest of the class goes back to their projects. When Peko sits back down, she tries to hide her smile behind her glue gun.

*

Her swaying turns into stepping, after that. She practices idly while she cleans: one-two-three, one-two-three.

She catches him watching her while they’re wiping down the restaurant together. She goes pink across the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t realize I…”

“No, it’s…” _The cutest thing I've ever fucking seen_ , he wants to say. Or: _I’m glad you found something you like._ What comes out is: “Will you show me?”

“… Really?”

“Uh, yeah. I mean… if you want.”

She does. She sets her mop against the wall and takes him by both hands, careful and a little awkward. She shows him the individual steps that Sonia showed her, counting out time under her breath.

It’s way, way harder than it looks. 

He’s no pushover. He’s coordinated, even if he’s nowhere near the athlete Peko is. But like this, trying to concentrate on the music and _not_ on how warm she is this close, it’s like his brain falls straight out of his head.

It’s going okay, though, until she does something with her arms he doesn’t understand, and suddenly they’re all tangled together, his back to her front. His ears go hot. “Shit,” he mutters. “Did I- Did I fuck it up again?”

Her nose is in his hair. He feels her laugh like a wave across his scalp and down his spine. “No,” she says. “It’s my fault. Sonia mentioned that I should try to… ‘change it up,’ sometimes. It’s more difficult than I expected.”

“The hell were you trying to do with _this?_ ”

“W-Well, if… I go like this…” She rocks back from him, and lifts their linked hands over his head. He still doesn’t get it. “Then… You’re supposed to spin,” she finishes, awkward.

Oh.

He does it. He spins. He feels like an asshole doing it, with all the grace of a damn dodo bird, but he does it.

The timing’s all wrong. The song peters out halfway through, and by the end they’re facing each other again, one set of hands still linked together. His whole face is burning, from his collar to his hairline. When he’s brave enough to look up, she’s smiling, and obviously trying not to.

“Don’t laugh!”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You’re the one who told me to do it!”

She glances over the restaurant railing at the pool deck below. It’s empty, for now. “I know,” she says softly. She steps close. She lets their fingers lace. She’s still flushed and smiling. “Thank you.” 

She bends into his space, and the song clicks over.


	14. iridescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More flower fics! This one is for raspberry (remorse), sweet pea (delicate pleasures), and jonquil (desire). This one contains sexual situations (but is not explicit); please read with discretion!

Peko swings her knee up and over, straddling his hips so that she can sink down into his lap.

It’s at this point that a line is crossed.

It isn’t sexual. It isn’t yet, at least. They’re both fully-clothed, and his arms are hooked only loosely around her hips, over the waistline of her skirt. She’d only moved because it was getting uncomfortable not to, muscles in her neck stretched to aching. The couch is too narrow to accommodate them both in many other configurations.

This boundary is somewhere else, but it comes from a similar animal part of her brain, wedged deep at the base of her skull. Breaching it tickles unpleasantly, but faintly, the same inexplicable nagging sensation she’s been teaching herself to ignore, bit by bit.

He’s smiling at her, his mouth a calm, shallow curve. She touches her thumb to the edge of it, and the tickle dims.

The television murmurs behind her. It’s an old CRT, one that Souda managed to find and refurbish enough to be usable with a VCR. The only tapes they have are documentaries and family films from before the Tragedy, but, in Souda’s words: “We should take whatever good we can get in this crapshoot, right?”

(They’d been watching an educational film about different wildlife species across Japan. It had started off strong, following bears and monkeys and wild cats, but transitioned to something about insects several minutes ago. That was the point even she lost interest.)

The glow from the screen cuts around her back, and leaves his face cast in her shadow.

“I’m blocking your view,” she says.

A small, quiet laugh bubbles from his chest without resistance. “Trust me,” he answers. “You’re not.” 

She bows her forehead against his, and closes her eyes. She enjoys the sensation of finding her way by touch and familiarity alone. (Maybe more accurately: she enjoys that she is familiar enough now not to lose her way.) She follows the line of his nose, the curve of his cheek, the warm touch of his breath on her chin.

He sighs when she kisses him. It’s gentle, comfortable, like warm water from a showerhead or down feathers in a pillow. It used to be that touching was stressful as often as not; his breath would stutter, or hers would stop, or the both of them would grip each other too hard, enough to bruise, like one of them might slip out of the other’s fingers if they let themselves be as lax as they were before.

It still is stressful, sometimes. But more and more nights are starting like tonight, with the scales tipped in their favor.

His fingers find the hem of her skirt, trace it, tug at it, and then dip under it. He slides his palms against the grain of her tights, and the nylon prickles at the fine hair along the outside of her thighs.

It sends a jolt through her that coils low in her pelvis, electric and enticing. 

The feeling isn’t unfamiliar, not anymore, but it still catches her off-guard. It still rattles off her skull and through ribcage like a panicked bird, upsetting the rhythm of her heart and lungs. There's a sickly pull in her chest. Her breath withers somewhere in her throat.

He pinches her gently, beneath her ribs. She manages to lift her eyelids and find his face, tilted up to hers. “You good?” he murmurs, soft but steady. His other hand retreats back out towards her knee.

She doesn’t answer right away. She’s learned to let the feeling settle, until the bright burn dims into something comfortable, instead of smothering. He watches her, the pupil of his good eye wide and dark, and waits.

She bobs her head, but she’s supposed to answer verbally. That’s what they agreed. She inhales through her nose, finds half the air she needs, and breathes, “Yes,” against his mouth.

They kiss. Her, or him— who initiated feels like an inconsequential detail next to the slick, eager curl of his tongue against hers. (But maybe that’s unfair; it’s a detail that's always mattered more to him than it has to her.) It isn’t like the single, lingering kiss from before; it’s one after the other, biting and breathless, between her picking at buttons near his throat and him hitching her skirt higher on her waist. They both find skin, flushed and warm.

(It has crossed into sexual, now.)

Her right leg aches, at the angle she has it locked into. She braces both hands on the back of the couch, by his head, and rises up on her knees.

She only means to shift her weight. But friction is friction, and he shudders beneath her when she slides back down, nails biting into the tops of her thighs. “Fuck.” He buries his face against her chest, and then, drawn ragged from his throat: “ _Peko._ ”

The vibration of his voice on her skin sets every nerve in her body alight. Or maybe— not that, she thinks, pleasantly dizzy. He’s done that before, hasn’t he? Maybe. She doesn’t know what makes it different this time, his voice or her name or the way it rumbles in his chest.

Instinct pulls at her. She wants to feel it again, that sudden bright buzz through all her muscles. 

She sinks lower. She rolls her hips forward until the two of them are flush from belly to chest, and brackets him in with both arms. She pins him between her and the back of the couch, and hovers her mouth just out of reach.

“Shit,” he breathes.

It’s like lightning. It makes the feeling from before seem like static in comparison. It fills her from toe to tip with something searing, and heavy, and overwhelming.

He’s breathing hard. She needs to ask, she realizes through the tangled heat of her own want. “I-Is…" She has to swallow. Her mouth is dry. "Is this alright?”

He nods, jerky, against the side of her neck. She’s supposed to wait for a verbal answer. That’s what they agreed. (Her fingers tremble against the couch’s back cushion.) 

“Yeah,” he manages, after a second. “Yes. Yeah. Fuck.”

It’s alright.

He said yes.

He’s ceding control of the situation to her.

The unpleasant tickle near the back of her mind shoots to the surface. It’s like striking at a single chip in a pane of glass: the whole sheet shatters around it, without warning. She can feel the cracks lance through her.

She has no right to take from him like this. Unrelenting, drunk on her own selfishness, a leech on his kindness when she was supposed to be an advantage to his will. She has forgotten the core purpose of her being. She is rusted, broken, useless.

She is—

Nothing.

Nothing.

_Nothing—_

There’s a pinch, beneath her ribs. She tries to open her eyes, and can’t. She hadn’t realized she’d closed them.

“Peko,” he says, like a slice through the haze. His breath is unsteady, but his voice is firm and clear. “Hey. Are you good?”

Her _yes_ surges high in her throat, then lodges there, a bright-edged shard of glass. Want and guilt mix in her chest until she can’t tell the difference between them; the combined force of it presses on her lungs and throat until she chokes, eyes burning.

Yes. She wants to say yes. She does not deserve to say yes.

“Hey, hey.” He’s holding her. He’s tipped her back, somehow, wrapped his arms beneath her shoulders. He draws her hair back from her neck, his fingers cool against her skin. “We can stop,” he says. “Do you wanna stop?”

She breathes, finally, shuddering. She says, “Yes.”

Everything stops.

When she opens her eyes again, she is alone on the couch. She is bundled in a blanket, the edges tucked around her shoulders and beneath her chin. There is a mostly-full glass of water on the floor by her feet.

A dragonfly zooms across the grainy screen of the television. Its body is bright, metallic blue. She watches it balance on the flat edge of a leaf.

The cushion dips to her right. Not alone, she realizes.

He’s sitting on the couch beside her still. He’s close, but not touching; there are several inches at least between the edges of both their knees. He watches the dragonfly take to the air again, his chin set on his knuckles. He looks tired.

He has his other hand laid out on the knee closest to her, his palm facing up.

She breathes. The dragonfly's wings are a blur of chaotic, elegant motion.

She snakes her arm out from under the blanket, and curls her fingers into his.


	15. remedial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another flower prompt! This one was for buttercup (ingratitude).

Their first year of middle school, Harasawa Himari is the most popular girl in their class. She is well-spoken and friendly, with a pretty, round face and butterfly pins in her hair. She makes top marks, and is an emerging figure on the girl’s track team. **  
**

She corners Peko in the girl’s locker room. (And Peko _feels_ cornered by it, the weight of Harasawa’s presence and the wall of eyes that follow her.)  “Pekoyama-san,” she asks, perfect teeth bared, “does Kuzuryuu-kun have a girlfriend?”

It’s not private, or subtle, or quiet. The other girls shriek with giggling play-horror.

“Are you interested in _him_ Harasawa-san?!”

“You know who his family is, right? Right?”

“Himari-chan’s gonna be a femme fatale!”

“She’s _gonna_ end up in a ditch somewhere.”

“Look at Pekoyama-san’s face!”

“Shh shh shh!”

Peko says, “I don’t know,” and shuts her locker door. It’s true. How the young master conducts his relationships is not her business.

Harasawa’s face falls in coordinated disappointment. “Oh… really?” She blushes a delicate shade of pink, just in the apples of her cheeks. “I thought if anybody knew, it would be you. This is so embarrassing… You won’t tell him, right?”

Peko doesn’t answer.

Harasawa smiles at her, and takes her silence as tacit agreement. “I appreciate it, Pekoyama-san.”

*

The young master does not connect easily with his peers. Most avoid him by reputation alone, and those that don’t learn to regret it once they’ve faced down the force of his temper.

(He would never admit to loneliness, always insists his isolation is by design, but Peko has been walking behind him for too many years to not notice the way his shoulders tense when a circle of their classmates erupt into laughter during lunchtime.)

Harasawa, however, does not allow herself to be intimidated. Not by him, and certainly not by Peko. The morning after making her intentions known to the girl’s locker room, she stops by his desk and smiles, coy and demure, where everyone can see her. “Good morning, Kuzuryuu-kun.”

He glares up at her, leant back in his chair. “Speak for yourself.”

She isn’t cowed. She maintains his gaze, still smiling, and only says, “I am,” before returning to her seat at the front of the room.

(He complains to Peko about it later— “What the fuck was that? Stuck up bitch,”— but in the moment, his eyes follow the sway of her hips.)

Harasawa keeps trying. She is as unassuming as she is persistent, her firm friendliness never eroding an inch. She doesn’t cross his boundaries, but neither does she back down from his challenges. She smiles easily, and is pretty when she laughs.  

Eventually, on occasion, the young master smiles back. Harasawa graduates from greeting him in the morning, to asking him questions about class lectures, to standing with him at his locker in the afternoon and telling him insignificant stories about her track meets. One day she calls him ‘Fuyuhiko-kun,’ and he lets her.

Peko says nothing. On the days he lingers with Harasawa, Peko waits for them to finish, and then she escorts him home. 

How he conducts his relationships is not her business.

*

They have kissed once, that Peko is aware of.

She hadn’t meant to intrude. Her goal had been to observe Harasawa during her practice while the young master attended his after school clubs, but instead she finds them both skipping, tucked together behind one of the broad trees by the track field. 

It’s Harasawa’s initiative. They’re only talking, at first, until she takes it upon herself to adjust the lopsided knot of his tie. She tugs him down, tilts her own chin up, and their lips meet clumsily in the middle. It looks uncomfortable for the both of them.

Harasawa giggles when it’s over. She buries her face into his chest, her cheeks that same delicate shade of pink, and it’s at that point Peko realizes she’s been watching too long.

She returns to the front of the school building to wait for him. (There is an unfamiliar tightness in her chest.) However he chooses to spend his time, she will ensure she is available whenever she is needed. 

He’s alone when he emerges some time later, his bag slung over one shoulder. He rubs at his neck when he sees her. “Dammit, Peko,” he says. “You don’t have to always wait out here for me.”

“I do,” she answers. “It’s my responsibility to see you home safely.”

His cheeks flush. She’s upset him, again. “You’re not listening! I’m telling you, you _don’t_. I’m not some little kid you have to keep tabs on all the time.”

She isn’t sure how to answer. She doesn’t want to upset him further, but her duty is immutable. “I’m sorry, young master,” she says, in lieu of anything else.

“Whatever.” He strides past her, head low. “Let’s just go.”

*

The young master begins to complain of money missing from his wallet. It’s in small increments, a few hundred yen he thought he had suddenly not there when he stops at a vending machine, but it continues over the course of several weeks.

It takes only timing for Peko to catch Harasawa in the act.

She has the acting skills suited for con artistry, but not the mental steel. Her fingers tremble when she slips her hand into the young master’s jacket pocket, even though he’s already left the room, and even though she must have already done it countless times before.

“I would recommend you put that back where you found it,” Peko says, turning the corner of the door, and Harasawa flinches so badly the wallet tumbles from her fingers.

She scrambles to pick it up. “Pekoyama-san,” she says, and her smile is weak. It’s the first time Peko has seen her afraid. She presses the wallet back into its pocket. “You surprised me. I was just— I was—”

“Hey.”

The young master is behind her, in the doorway. Peko steps aside to let him past, but he hovers, squinting at her. “What are you doing?”

“Pekoyama-san was looking for you,” Harasawa says, rising to her feet. Her composure smooths back over her face, but her hands still shake when she picks at the hem of her skirt. “I should get to practice. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

In her haste to get out, she fumbles her role. He dislikes public displays of affection, but she still leans up to kiss his cheek when she passes. He rubs at the spot with the heel of his hand.

Harasawa’s footsteps retreat down the hall. The idea of her walking away sits poorly in Peko’s stomach, but the choice isn’t hers to make. 

She waits, but he won’t make eye contact with her. He steps past her to gather his things, and then makes for the door. “C’mon,” he says over his shoulder. “Let’s go home.” 

She follows. He’s walking fast down the empty hallway; she has to lengthen her strides to keep pace with him.

“Young master,” she tries.

He doesn’t answer. 

“Young master, there’s something important that—”

He turns around so quickly that they nearly collide. Peko stumbles a step back, to give him space.

“How stupid do you think I am?” he demands.

“I don’t—”

“I know it’s her. Who the fuck else would it be?” His fists are clenched. His shoulders tremble with barely-restrained emotion. Peko isn’t sure that all of it is anger. “You seriously thought I couldn’t figure that out on my own?”

“No,” she says. “I only wanted to confirm her guilt so that you—”

“Well, stop! How many times do I have to fucking say it? I don’t need you following me around picking up after me all the time! Just stay out of my business!”

He sucks in a breath. It rattles, damp, in his chest. He turns his back on her, scrubbing at his eyes.

“I am your tool,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else. “I’ve overstepped my bounds. I apologize. Whatever course of action you decide, I will carry it out.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he answers, muffled by his sleeve. “Just stop, Peko.”

He walks away.

She waits ten paces, and then she follows.

*

It takes another week, but it happens. He and Harasawa come back from lunch separately: him first, scraping the chair back from his desk, and her second, her eyes puffy and her makeup smudged. The understanding is that whatever was between them ended, but no amount of prodding from the other girls gets Harasawa to offer any more explanation than that.

A month later, she transfers to another school.

No one approaches his desk again.

*

The morning of their first day of high school, he sends her away.

“The second we walk in there, there’s nothing between you and me,” he tells her for the third time, while he fixes his tie. “We’re classmates. We met today. You can’t be hanging around me all the time.” He stares at her through the mirror. “Understand?”

Hope’s Peak is his chance to grow. It is the opportunity he needs to finally shed all the excess weight of his childhood that has been holding him back.

She says, “Yes.”


	16. riverbanks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon asked for happy family. :)

Peko is the first one up, almost every single day.

So many years of work schedules and harsh punishments for tardiness trained her body to be restless before dawn, and no amount of peaceful mornings so far have been able to train it out of her. Most days she slips out of bed, careful not to disturb either him or Nozomi, and gets a head start on chores: laundry and sweeping and the beginnings of breakfast, to entice them up when it’s time. **  
**

But today, when he opens his eyes, her side of the futon isn’t empty.

She’s awake. She must have been for hours already. She has her right hand tucked beneath her pillow and her knees drawn up to better cocoon Nozomi between them. She’s smoothing her fingertips through Nozomi’s hair, gentle and repetitive, until the pale tangles unwind.  

He touches her ankle with the edge of his foot. Her eyes lift, and her smile spreads.

“Hi,” he whispers.

“Good morning,” she whispers back.

He pulls his legs up, too, until their knees are set together. It puts Nozomi in a bowl, framed on all sides. She snuffles against the futon, and Peko’s fingers hover until she settles again, slow breath evening out.

“You were peaceful,” Peko says softly, curling a lock of hair behind Nozomi’s ear. “The both of you. I couldn’t… I didn’t…”

“I get it,” he answers. “S’good.”

She smiles at him, again. It’s so easy, without restraint, and the only downside of this sleeping configuration is that it’s harder to kiss her, from over here. He kisses the tips of his fingers instead, and reaches over to press them against the corner of her smile. (He feels it twitch wider.) She catches him by the wrist and touches her lips to the center of his palm.

“You’re squishing me,” Nozomi complains between them, slurred with sleep.

Peko laughs, a little exhale, and tilts her chin down to touch her nose to the top of Nozomi’s head. She lets go of his hand. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We didn’t mean to.”

“Speak for yourself,” he says. He throws his arm over them both, hooked around the edge of Peko’s waist, and pulls. It bundles the three of them together, him and Peko nose-to-nose with Nozomi squirming between them.

“No! Nooo!” she squeals, between her giggles. “Daddy, I’m squished!”

“There are worse wake up calls to have,” he says, and Peko sighs. She’s close enough to kiss now, so he does, a quick peck on the lips. “Breakfast? Lookin’ like it’s my turn today.”

“Fish!” Nozomi demands, dragging herself up by his shoulder. Her hair sticks up on one side, the only section Peko hadn’t been able to smooth out.

“Sure, kid.”

She wiggles her way out from between them and tumbles over him to the other side of the futon. “Wake up!” she calls on her way out of the room, small feet noisy on the mat. “It’s time for breakfast!”

The room gets quiet again. It’ll only last a second or two. He tightens his grip around Peko’s waist until the gap between them closes, and she winds her arm around his back, her chin tucked against his shoulder.

They take their seconds, and then the day begins.


	17. darkroom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More flower fics! This one requested impatiens (impatience), thistle (misanthropy), and quince (temptation) for Mahiru/Natsumi.

All of her pictures of Natsumi are wrong. **  
**

They aren’t _bad_. The group shots especially are nice; she has plenty of Natsumi mugging shamelessly for the camera, her elbow hooked around Yume’s neck. They’re just not right. Off. 

_Why_ isn’t a mystery. (Even Natsumi’s spontaneous grins feel guarded and manufactured, and always have.) But time is running out. Graduation is looming, only months away, and her record still feels incomplete.

The three of them go shopping one day during winter break. Yume has to leave early, her mother calling her home to help with her little brother, so Mahiru and Natsumi get crepes and detour to a little park off of the outdoor mall. 

Mahiru picks out a bench, to eat and to people watch. Natsumi trails behind her, tapping at her phone with her free thumb. “Ooooh, guess who made it to the front page of the Hope’s Peak message board?” she calls. “You’re moving up in the world, Ma-chan!”

Mahiru rolls her eyes. “You shouldn’t buy into websites like that,” she says. She wraps the top of her crepe in a napkin and balances it in her lap. “It’s so early. What could they possibly have to scout?”

She snaps pictures, while she has the chance. Young adults with their dogs, parents with their children, older couples walking together. Natsumi sits cross-legged beside her and eats, her crepe in one hand and her phone in the other.

“You’re thinking too small,” she says. “Now is when the real frontrunners show up, you know. They’re already saying my brother’s a shoo-in for a spot next year. Maybe you should try paying _more_ attention.”

Natsumi smiles at her sideways, and— there. That’s the kind of photo Mahiru wants. The muted curve of her mouth, the winter-pale freckles across her nose, the rosiness of her cheeks in the cold. 

She’s not quick enough, though. Natsumi takes a too-big bite of her crepe, and the moment is gone. Chocolate smears at the corner of her mouth.

Mahiru sighs. “You’re making a mess, Na-chan,” she says. She holds out a spare napkin. “Left side.”

Natsumi waves the napkin away. She chases the spot of chocolate with her tongue instead, a peek of pink between her lips.

“Quit bothering with these jerks,” she says, waving her crepe in a wide arc, “and let’s talk _strategy_.”

*

The final term of the school year starts. The photography club gears up for elections, to pick new officers to replace Mahiru and the other graduating third years. 

Natsumi acts like she doesn’t want the president spot, but she’s surly the whole week after she doesn’t get it. She comes late to school in the mornings, she disappears during lunchtime, and she turns down all their invitations to hang out after clubs are over.

She skips the next photography meeting altogether, and that’s where Mahiru draws the line.

She finds Natsumi in her empty classroom after school, stuffing her PE bag back into her locker. “Go away,” she says over her shoulder, when Mahiru stops in the doorway. “I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Where were you?” Mahiru asks anyway. “I didn’t tolerate absences when I was president. You know Yasui won’t either.”

Natsumi laughs. It’s her fake, musical trill, the one Mahiru has represented so well in her photo albums. “And?” she says. “Yasui can kick me out if he wants. I’m quitting anyway.”

She has no reason to feel blindsided. She saw it coming all week. It still feels like an open-palmed slap across the face. “ _Quitting?_ ”

“Yeah,” Natsumi says, flinty at the edges. “ _Quitting_. I’m done wasting my time taking other people’s profile pictures.”

“What about your photography?” Mahiru tries. “You’ve got so much potential. You’re really just going to give that up?”

Natsumi’s knuckles go white around the door of her locker. “Don’t patronize me,” she snaps.

“I wasn’t—”

“Like you give a crap about some dinky middle school club, anyway. You’ve got bigger and better things to think about, right? You always knew you were better than us chumps.”

It’s hard not to flinch, when Natsumi glares. There’s always something detached and cold behind it, something that turns the soft roundness of her face harsh. It makes her look like what she is, the product of the world she comes from.

Mahiru has been holding her ground for two years. She doesn’t flinch. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” she says. “I learned a lot at this school’s club. You would too, if you gave it a chance.”

Natsumi slams her locker door hard enough that the sound echoes in the empty classroom. “Fuck off with your holier-than-thou bullshit,” she spits. “I’m so _sick_ of it.”

She jostles Mahiru’s shoulder on her way out the door. Mahiru lets her. Her eyes are stinging and she doesn’t know why.

“This is just like you,” she calls after her. “You start to genuinely like something, and then the second it looks like it might get difficult, you run away from it.”

Natsumi doesn’t look back.

*

Their argument goes the way of all the others: they both ignore it until the uneasy animosity settles enough that they can talk again. Natsumi quits photography. Mahiru gets ready for graduation.

On the last day of class, they sit together on the bleachers after school and watch Yume run her relay sprints. Mahiru has her camera on her knees. Natsumi has her phone so close to her face the backlight casts a reflection on her chin, even in the daytime.

“Who’s on the front page today?” Mahiru asks.

Natsumi lights up. She lifts her head to answer, and— there. 

Mahiru is ready this time. She presses the shutter: her camera clicks, and Natsumi balks.

“Hey! What the hell was that?! You have to warn me first!”

“What would be the point of that?” Mahiru asks. She props the camera up in her lap and clicks back through the display. “I’d never get a good one that way.”

In the photo, Natsumi has her face tilted up from her phone, her eyes set just beyond the camera. Her freckles are brighter against her skin, from all the spring sun the past few weeks. Her hair is lit up from behind and to the left, a golden semi-circle around her face. She’s in the early lift of a smile, barely there.

Everything about her is gentle, soft, and warm. It makes her look like what she is, the part she doesn’t want anyone else to see.

Relief floods Mahiru’s chest. “There,” she says. “This one. That’s it.”

Natsumi leans over to look. Mahiru doesn’t mind until it’s already happening, struck by a sudden, unfamiliar wave of self-consciousness. It’s a good picture. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. She still thinks about covering the display with her palm.

It’s too late, anyway. Natsumi’s forehead is pinched between her eyebrows, and Mahiru’s heart is in her throat.

“I wanted one more picture,” she tries to explain. “Of you, the way I see you. Before I graduated. You know?” 

It doesn’t help. The self-consciousness burns in her face and neck. All she can do is wait, eyes on her knees. They’re sitting so close they’re almost bumping Natsumi’s.

“This is how you see me?” Natsumi asks. It’s the first time Mahiru’s ever heard her so quiet, but it doesn’t take away from the force of her. It just shrinks the world to accommodate her.

Mahiru lifts her chin. She nods.

Natsumi glances down. Mahiru thinks maybe she’s looking at the photo again, but then she puts her hand down on the bleacher between them. The edge of her pinky brushes the edge of Mahiru’s and it’s so— so _childish,_ the way she freezes up. She’s about to go to high school. She’s more mature than this. 

She licks her lips, without thinking. She watches Natsumi copy her, a peek of pink at the corner of her mouth, and feels breathless. “Na-chan, um…”

Across the field, a girl shrieks with laughter. The relay races are wrapping up. A teacher barks at the students to mind themselves. 

The world zooms back out again. It encircles everyone else and all their wandering eyes, Yume and their classmates and the dour teacher. Mahiru’s breath rushes back into her lungs.

“I think they’re finished,” she blurts. “We should go.” 

She stands up from the bleacher, and wipes her dusty hands on her skirt. When Yume waves up at her from the track down below, she waves back and hops down to meet her on wobbly legs.

Natsumi doesn’t follow.

*

The moment goes the way of all the others: they ignore it. There’s time, Mahiru tells herself. It’ll get better.

High school will change everything.


	18. critique

He knows when Natsumi’s done printing her photos. The whole damn house has to know, with the way she books it down the hallway. She busts into the den before he even has time to get off the couch, hair piled high on her head and grin not-quite hidden behind the fan of her prints. **  
**

He flops back down on the cushions and tries to let the TV drown her out.

It doesn’t work.

“Scoot,” she barks, flapping the photos at him. “I want you to look at these.”

“Get lost,” he answers. “I’m watching something.”

“Not anymore!” She tries to pick his knees up to make room for herself on the couch, and when he doesn’t cooperate, sits on his shins instead.

“Ow! Get the fuck off of me!”

“That’s what you get for being lazy!” He kicks and wriggles, but she still wins the stalemate: he’s a pretzel and she’s sitting there grinning with her legs crossed neatly under her. “Now look and tell me what you think.”

She dumps the stack of photos onto his chest. He picks his head up enough to squint at them; they’re all outdoor shots of the wharf at night, dark water reflecting the bright lights of the cityscape. She’s pulled out all the stops: quality paper, vibrant ink, and a smooth, glossy finish.

They’re nice. He likes them. 

(He can practically hear Koizumi’s passive-aggressive sigh in his ear. No, okay. He can do better. _Why_ are they nice?)

Natsumi tucks her arms against her middle. “ _Well?_ ”

“You did a good job with the colors,” he says. “Like, how they’re kinda oversaturated? Makes ‘em all bright and in your face— but not in a shitty way, or anything. It’s good. Feels like being there, y’know?”

Her jaw actually, literally drops. It’s almost satisfying enough just to see her sputter. “Since when do _you_ give a shit about photography?”

“I _don’t_ ,” he snaps, letting his head fall back against the armrest. “You _asked_. What the fuck do you want from me?”

She sniffs, and plucks the photos out of his fingers. “Most of the time I don’t get _anything_ from you! Excuse me for being surprised that you finally decided to grow a brain.”

“Whatever.” He kicks at her hip. “Now get lost! I’m missing the good part ‘cause of you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t pull something working so hard.”

She has her chin up in a huff when she leaves, probably to go find someone else to badger for their opinion, but when she turns the corner he catches the tiny, genuine curve of her smile.

Getting there.


	19. hope, truth

The doctors tell them to be prepared. Emotionally, they say, as much as physically.

It isn't a platitude, or a promise, or a saccharine commentary on parenthood. Each of their doctors is hand-picked by the Future Foundation: top of their fields, with crisp, direct bedside manners. (Kirigiri’s selections, not Naegi’s.) They mince no words; they are upfront about relative fertilities and the possibility of miscarriage. Their opinions all average to the same reality: after everything the two of them have been through, it may be difficult to conceive and carry to term. They should prepare for months or years of trying, with no guarantee of results.

They do. They prepare together, meticulously, and when the both of them are ready, they try.

Within the month, she knows. 

She doesn’t suspect, she _knows_. She’s been too in-tune with her body for too long to not be able to hear the messages it sends her, as subtle as they might be. There's no mistaking it. She touches her stomach in the mirror and waits for the rush of relief, the anticipation, the fear, the happiness.

Her fingers feel cold on her own skin, in the chill of the early morning.

That evening, when he asks if anything interesting happened in her day, arms wound around her waist and playful lips behind her ear, she says, “Not really.”

She keeps waiting. Her next period is late, the way she expects. She counts the days, and lets the confirmation sink in. She hopes it will somehow cement the reality in her mind, unstopper her heart, let the proper feelings out.

It doesn’t.

The morning after it’s been too many days to consider her period “late” rather than simply “missed,” she sits at the end of their bed and waits for him to finish dressing. He pops in and out of the closet, fussing over clashing colors and mixing patterns, and she wonders how she ever thought she might be suited to be a mother.

“Peko.”

She looks up. She hadn’t noticed whenever he stopped what he was doing; he’s watching her from the open doorframe of the closet, his tie hanging loose from his fingers and his mouth turned down.

“Hey,” he says. “Is everything okay?”

It’s unfair to keep it from him. He should be allowed to feel it, even if she can’t. Every step they take they should always take together.

She tests the words on the tip of her tongue. They feel too simple to say, but there’s nothing more complicated that says it any better, so she does anyway: “I’m pregnant.”

Emotion telegraphs so easily through his face. She watches it unfold like a picture book, page by page: the initial blowback of shock, the pinch of confusion around his eyes, the spot of brightness that blooms into raw petals of joy, pride, excitement, trepidation. Too many for her to count.

He forgets to keep hold of his tie; it coils on the floor when he rushes forward to kneel beside her. It’s too high-quality silk to be left to the dust like that, she thinks, but he’s already talking too quickly to be reminded. He runs himself out of breath for talking.

“Un-be-fucking-lievable,” he says, laughing, still breathless. “After all that shit those doctors gave us, too! That’ll fuckin’ show ‘em.” 

His palm curls over her belly, so careful and gentle even though there isn’t anything there yet, no bump or curve or any evidence to speak of. It's warm. “Do- Do you feel sick?” he’s asking, “Is that how you know? They’ve gotta have something for that, I can ask Tsumiki—” and she pictures a small face, a little girl with his pale green eyes. She thinks that if her child is anything like him, she couldn’t possibly ask for more.

The rush comes.

It’s a wave that takes her under, massive and disorienting. Elation and terror and hope and shame and possibility—

He touches her face, the back of his knuckles against her cheek. It’s only when his skin comes away damp that she feels her own tears. 

“What?” he asks. “What is it?”

She shakes her head. She cups her palm against the side of his neck and whispers, “I love you.”

Emotion telegraphs so easily through his face. Concern warms to affection, then to fondness, and then to something she recognizes but can’t name, weighty and painful and wonderful, that bows his head against her shoulder. He breathes in, draws her close, and his lashes tickle the crook of her neck. “Me too,” he whispers back. “I love you, too.”


	20. peripheral

He doesn’t mind the eye, much. It takes getting used to, obviously— he’s always dropping things and missing things and knocking glasses against countertops— but it’s more annoying than life-changing. It’s just that he needs to look both ways a little more often than he used to, and that it’s a little bit harder to keep track of his stuff. **  
**

They’re supposed to have dinner with the new branch heads of the new clan. It’s a big deal. If they can get it off the ground, the clan will be in an even better position to help spread the newfound stability that’s been cropping up around the world.

And he can’t find his fucking _pocket square._

He’s been living without the damn eye long enough to know when it’s time to call in reinforcements. He leans around the edge of the stairwell from the bottom and shouts up to the second floor: “Hey! Peko!”

“I’m here,” she answers, just to his right.

It's not the first time. It's not the hundredth time. Hearing her voice so unexpectedly close still makes him jump out of his skin. “ _Shit,_ sorry.” He turns his head. “Have you seen…”

She’s at his elbow, smiling, a little amused and endlessly patient. She’s punctual, and so she’s already done up in her evening dress, with its high neck and bare shoulders, in gleaming black silk. Her hair is pulled back, twisted high and pierced with a single red stick. Most of it, anyway. She missed a curl at the nape of her neck.

He says, “Oh.”

“Is this what you’re looking for?” She tucks the little pocket square into his jacket, and plucks at the ends to better flare them out. It’s dark blue with white spots, like his tie.

“Fuckin’ thing. Knew it was around here somewhere.”

“You left it upstairs,” she tells him. Her fingers curl loosely in the lapel of his jacket. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Just one more thing.”

Her eyebrows lift, asking the question without needing the words. They don’t always need the words. But tonight’s special, so he wraps his fingers around hers and says what’s in his head.

“You’re really beautiful.”

Her smile curls up, color rises in her cheeks, and those he can see just fine.


	21. snare

Hope’s Peak isn’t like other schools; anybody with a brain knows that. Some examples are obvious, like the exam structure at the end of the year. Others, less so, like the practice exam left up and unmarked by the third-year Ultimate Trapper trying to prepare for them.

It’s a hidden compartment disguised as an ordinary classroom door; he’s the first one to reach it, and that more or less seals his fate. The compartment itself was probably meant for just one person, or maybe a medium-sized animal or something— but Peko is right behind him, and her instinct will always be to reach out and pull him back from a threat, or barring that, follow him right into it.

She’s slender, and he’s, well. The two of them fit inside together just right for the automatic door to swing shut and lock behind them.

There’s a lot of confusion, some shouting. Saionji laughs for two or three minutes straight. Once they’ve figured out what happened, the rest of the class scatters to find the asshole who put the stupid thing there in the first place.

He and Peko wait.

They find a configuration that’s comfortable, sort of. They sit folded up on the floor of the compartment at opposite ends, his knees bunched up next to her shoulders, and vice-versa. After about ten minutes, it gets old.

“Shit, my leg’s falling asleep. This is such a fuckin’ pain.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’re you apologizing for?” He braces one foot against the side of the compartment, to at least stretch his hamstring. Peko presses her shoulder against the opposite wall to give him more room. “C’mon, don’t do that,” he says. “I got plenty of space. All you’re gonna do is give yourself a cramp.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“Peko.”

She resettles herself, but now she looks even more uncomfortable than she did before. She looks mechanical, her muscles locked up.

“I should be able to disarm the trap,” she says. “I’m not. That’s why I need to apologize.”

“Well, don’t,” he tells her. “What’re you supposed to do, fight the box?”

Her answer is seamless. “I could find and exploit weak interior hinges, puncture a hole in the ceiling or base, or use force until the lock fails.”

“That’s not— Look, it’s fine, okay? This isn’t dangerous, it’s just stupid.” The only light that’s coming in is from the thin seam at the top of the door. It’s just enough to see the whites of her eyes swing down to her knees. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

“Yes, young master.”

It’s the first time she’s called him that in a while. Weeks, maybe. With as loose as the school’s scheduling is, they aren’t often alone, and she took his instructions to pretend not to know each other to heart. _Kuzuryuu_ has been rolling off her tongue with what seemed to him like no effort at all.

Maybe he got too used to it. The title stings more than it usually does.

They wait awhile. It’s hard to know how long for; he left his phone in the classroom, and the seconds feel like they stretch out forever. She’s as calm as ever, eyes closed in silent meditation, and he realizes all at once that he has no fucking clue what to say to her. 

He’s been pretending for weeks that she’s just some girl in his class, but it was never supposed to _mean_ anything. Not to him, anyway. It was supposed to be an opportunity for her, and incidental to him. He was still supposed to see her sometimes, talk with her, that sort of thing. Maybe find a way to be friends, on their own terms.

It just hasn’t quite unfolded the way he thought it would when he came up with it.

“Can I ask you something?”

Her eyes flutter open, her sclera bright points of orientation in the darkness. “Of course.”

“Do you remember last week, when you sparred with that third year? What’s-his-name.”

“Nishihara?”

“Maybe. The dude with the pike.”

“Yes.” She shifts, ankles stretching near his elbow. “… I didn’t know you saw that.”

“Well, I mean, just some of it. It got pretty rowdy in there so I stuck my head in.” It’s not technically a lie. He’d shown up in the middle and stayed through the end. “Anyway, the point is, you _demolished_ that guy.”

“He was a formidable opponent,” she says, perfectly polite even though it’s just the two of them. “I was always going to have the advantage in close quarters. He didn’t surrender the win lightly.”

“You kidding? He didn’t stand a _chance._ It was like you were running circles around him.” He clears his throat. “I just- you’re working really hard, and it shows. I didn’t get a chance to talk to you after, so…”

The longer his eyes have to adjust, the easier it gets to see her face. She’s not really smiling, but the muscles around her mouth and eyes are softer. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs. “It’s one benefit of the academy, being in contact with so many skilled warriors from different disciplines.”

“Yeah? What, you guys like, compare notes and stuff?”

“Sometimes. They have perspectives that I lack, and vice-versa. Also…” She looks down again, but this time it’s more shy than ashamed. “It’s… nice, to be on good terms with everyone in the dojo.”

She’s dancing around the word. “So, you’re friends,” he says.

“I… believe so, yes.” She goes prematurely silent, thoughtful and a little awkward, the way she does when trying to pick tracks in a conversation.  “… Nishihara told me a joke the other day,” she says finally. “Would you like to hear it?”

It had to be Nishihara again, didn’t it. He smothers the flare of annoyance in his chest. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Hit me.”

She looks him dead in the eye. “You know,” she says, very seriously, “there is a difference between having no-mind and having no-mind.”

It’s totally nonsensical, but he laughs anyway, without meaning to, loud in their close quarters. Maybe it’s her delivery, or the absurdity of the situation finally getting to him. Whatever it is, it manages to break the lock on her smile; her mouth turns up at the corners, just enough.  

“Peko,” he says, once he can, “I gotta be honest, I’ve got _no clue_ what the fuck that means.”

She considers. “… It might be a niche sense of humor, that’s true.” She’s still smiling when she says it, though, and maybe she just played him, but that would be just as good, if he’s perfectly honest with himself.

He tells her about his first time running the yakisoba stand during the school festival. She tells him about how the school is apparently scouting a martial arts expert named Oogami Sakura, and how much she’s looking forward to talking with her. 

It’s hard to know how long they wait.

Eventually, there’s a knock on the outside of the compartment. “Kuzuryuu-kun,” Komaeda calls from the other side, “Pekoyama-san? Can you hear me?”

Fuyuhiko leverages himself up toward the gap in the door. “Yeah, dumbass, we can hear you,” he calls back. “What the fuck’s going on out there?”

“I happened to bump into Akagi-senpai when she was on her way out of the building. Literally, actually. Bad luck for her blouse, and for my coffee… but good luck for the two of you! She’s coming down now to release the trap mechanism.” 

“Well, get her over here, then! Jeez.”

Komaeda’s steps retreat down the hall, and Fuyuhiko sinks back down into his spot. “Fucking _finally,_ ” he mutters. “Those bastards took their sweet goddamn time, huh?”

She only nods. They sit in silence a while longer, and then she says, “Young master?”

It almost sounds like an accident. It’s hushed and clumsy, syllables tripping over each other. When he looks at her, there’s some expression on her face he’s never seen before.

His heart rate spikes, for no reason. “Yeah?”

“I know this situation has been uncomfortable for you,” she says, in that same rushed whisper. “And… I understand that when we’re released we’ll both need to return to our respective roles. B-But… I wondered if… maybe after, we…”

She doesn’t get there fast enough. She runs out of steam, and her confidence falters; when her sentence peters out, her mouth flattens into an unsure, disappointed line.

He can hear distant footsteps in the hall, and goddammit _now?_ Over an hour spent wedged in a stupid fucking box, and _now_ suddenly everybody feels like being snappy.

“What?” he presses.

She must hear it, too, because the she puts the brakes on whatever rocky, impulsive path she’d turned down. All unfamiliarity in her expression melts away, until she’s every bit as calm and impassive as she always is.

“Peko—”

“It’s nothing,” she answers softly, when the distant footsteps have turned into not-so-distant voices. “Please, do not concern yourself over it.”

The compartment cracks open. Light spills in, and when his eyes adjust, the class is huddled in a semi-circle around them. 

“Alive!” Mioda whoops. “They’re _aliiive!_ ”

And that’s it. Peko hoists herself up out of the compartment, he follows suit, and the wall comes up. They’ve been doing it this long; he barely even needs to think about it. 

“Will you cut it out?” he snaps, when Hanamura won’t stop poking him in the ribs. “The only _good news_ is that it turns out Pekoyama isn’t half as annoying as the rest of you dumbasses.”

“Thank you, but I’m fine,” she’s telling Koizumi behind him. “I think Kuzuryuu may have been more uncomfortable than I was.”

That’s it.


	22. pressure point

It still happens, sometimes, even years later. **  
**

Hinata told them from the beginning that their bodies wouldn’t ever be properly the same, and of course they wouldn’t be. It’s something that’s always been easy to understand, but difficult to adjust to in the day-to-day. They get used to the obvious things: his bad depth perception, her slower reaction times. It's everything else, the little things cropping up once or twice a month, that always seem to keep them one step below whatever might pass for normal.

Sometime in mid-summer, she tries to move a struggling pot of young eggplant somewhere it can get better light. (They keep a garden for the essentials, and because she likes the work.) Growing anything these days takes care, patience, and luck, and when the muscles in her arms lock up, the entire pot shatters on the ground.

He finds her like that, standing over the mess, dirt on her shoes. She has her right arm curled up against her stomach, too seized to relax. When he touches her elbow, she doesn’t flinch.

“Hey,” he says. “Do you…?” 

He doesn’t need to finish; it’s happened before. She nods, and lets him draw her arm out of its protective curl. It hurts, he knows, but she doesn’t fight him. She closes her eyes, sucks in a little breath, and bears it.

He sets his thumbs into the pit of her elbow, and smooths them over the tight muscles of her forearm, down to her wrist. From there he works his way back up, pressing out tension in small circles, firm enough to help but gentle enough not to hurt. 

Hinata had shown them how to do this, when the others were all still asleep and needed the stimulation. There were certain muscles that didn’t get engaged as much during the regular physiotherapy, and so needed a little extra help to encourage blood flow. 

“It won’t help much,” he’d told them. “But it’ll help.”

They’d done it in rotations, with short sessions to minimize the time with the pods left open. Twice a week he’d held Peko’s limp, white wrist in his hands and done the same thing he’s doing now.

Now, her skin is flush with healthy color. Every inch of her responds to his touch, not just the muscles he’s trying to coax smooth again. Her fingers twitch when he touches her wrist, and her breath catches when he makes his way back to the soft skin of her elbow. (She’s ticklish in both places, he knows now.) At some point she must’ve opened her eyes to watch him, because when he glances up she’s looking back at him, bright and attentive.

Eventually, the muscles relax. Her arm opens up, without pain leaving any creases in her face. He slides his fingers down to her wrist one more time, and lets his fingers rest on the thrum of her pulse.

“Better?” he asks.

She nods. She draws her hand back to lace her fingers through his, and squeezes. “Thank you.”

They both look down at what’s left of the battered plant. There are twisted stems, torn leaves, and exposed roots getting picked at by the afternoon breeze.

“We got more pots,” he says. “Let’s transplant him. See if we can bring him back.”

“The stress might kill it,” she answers.

She’s probably right. The poor bastard didn’t have much of a chance to start out with; the odds of it bouncing back in these conditions are slim. It might make more sense to cut their losses and start fresh with a new plant.

He swings her hand up, and presses a kiss to her wrist. “Let’s just try. Worth a shot, right?”

She smiles. She dips down to touch her lips to the backs of his knuckles. “Yes.”


End file.
